# Connecting a French Dictionary from the Beginning of the 20th Century to Wikidata

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.11022 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.11022/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Jun 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Zero-Shot Entity Linking by Reading Entity Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07348/) (2019)
- [Entity Linking in 100 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02690/) (2020)
- [MuVER: Improving First-Stage Entity Retrieval with Multi-View Entity Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05716/) (2021)
- [EntEval: A Holistic Evaluation Benchmark for Entity Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00137/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Linking Named Entities in Diderot's Encyclop'edie to Wikidata](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03221/) (2024)
- [Matching and Linking Entries in Historical Swedish Encyclopedias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01170/) (2025)
- [Mapping the Past: Geographically Linking an Early 20th Century Swedish Encyclopedia with Wikidata](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17903/) (2024)
- [ATLAS: Article Tracking, Linking, and Analysis of Swedish Encyclopedias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.02466/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The textitPetit Larousse illustr'e is a French dictionary first published in 1905. Its division in two main parts on language and on history and geography corresponds to a major milestone in French lexicography as well as a repository of general knowledge from this period. Although the value of many entries from 1905 remains intact, some descriptions now have a dimension that is more historical than contemporary. They are nonetheless significant to analyze and understand cultural representations from this time. A comparison with more recent information or a verification of these entries would require a tedious manual work. In this paper, we describe a new lexical resource, where we connected all the dictionary entries of the history and geography part to current data sources. For this, we linked each of these entries to a wikidata identifier. Using the wikidata links, we can automate more easily the identification, comparison, and verification of historically-situated representations. We give a few examples on how to process wikidata identifiers and we carried out a small analysis of the entities described in the dictionary to outline possible applications. The resource, i.e. the annotation of 20,245 dictionary entries with wikidata links, is available from GitHub urlhttps://github.com/pnugues/petitlarousse1905/